

The symposium was co-organized by two philosophy Ph.D.

For nearly five hours on the afternoon of January 3, 12 panelists and 75 spectators gathered over Zoom for a day of reckoning with the meme-friendly children’s movie.

This was the unique magic of the first annual Boss Baby symposium. “Winnicott says that we can’t have any understanding of the point of view of the baby, but I’m looking at it from the point of view of the baby.” “I was nervous about bringing in Winnicott because he really complicates my argument,” Poole replied warmly, then ventured that his thesis - a deep medical dive into the Boss Baby’s psychotic orientation to the world - still held true. During the Q&A, another resident, Rennie Burke of San Mateo County Behavioral Health and Recovery Services, wanted to know if Poole had factored in Donald Winnicott’s field-defining research into developmental psychology. Joshua Poole of UC Riverside, a psychiatry resident, had just wrapped up a 15-minute presentation on The Boss Baby, the 2017 DreamWorks film about a baby blessed with the mind, voice, and corporate fashion sense of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. “I guess my question is … can we even talk about the Boss Baby and the other employees of Baby Corp as babies?”
